Liberals began their hate on Chick-fil-A several years ago over the Christian views of the Cathy family that owns the chain. CEO Dan Cathy has acknowledged supporting traditional marriage as part of his religious beliefs and the family is publicly pro-life. And of course, one of the defining features of their company is that its restaurants are closed on Sunday. That’s apparently beyond the pale.

“They’re the type of company that closes on Sunday, puts money into lobbying against the LGBT community, and for that reason I will never support Chick-Fil-A until they change their ways,” Sacco said. [emphasis added]

That they close on Sunday is a reason not to support them? For a supposedly pro-labor party, I would think getting a day of rest would be a good thing. Of course, the reason the restaurants are closed is because the Cathy family takes seriously the Fourth Commandment and want to help their workers honor it. But public expressions of religious faith, more specifically expressions of traditional Christian religious faith, are forbidden among the liberal Democrats.

The veils are dropping and true natures are revealed. Like last week, when Nancy Pelosi blamed uneducated white men’s attachment to “guns, gays, and God” as the reasons why they support a Republican candidate over the Democrat “against their economic interests.” The lines are becoming clearer every day.

At the Republican convention last week, internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel echoed a lot of fiscally conservative Republicans today when he told social conservatives to stop letting things like bathroom gender policies (and presumably gay marriage and abortion and other social conservative causes) distract us from what’s really important.

I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.

You hear this kind of thing a lot from social liberals who genuinely believe that nothing serious is at stake in the culture war. If conservatives would just roll over and accept that the liberal view is naturally, obviously correct, we could get back to our “real” problems. […] What people like Thiel — really intelligent people, let us stipulate! — don’t understand is that not everybody values the things they do. Real, important things are being struggled over.

And also:

Culturally speaking, to be born in many places in the US is to suffer an irreversible lifelong defeat. If you come from a culturally conservative region, or family, you understand that the people who make the decisions in this culture are on the other side. At best they regard you as irrelevant. At worst, they hate you, and want to grind your nose in the dirt. Whatever the case, the things you value, that are important to your identity, and your sense of how the world is supposed to work, are either fading away or being taken from you — and you can’t do anything about it.

Living in Massachusetts as a cultural conservative, an orthodox Catholic who hews to the Church’s moral teachings, is related, but different. This is a culturally liberal region, and everyone around me regards me as irrelevant and a relic and a Neanderthal on my most fundamental and non-negotiable beliefs.

In North Carolina, for example, there’s enough cultural conservatives to pass laws and try to hold back the tide. In Massachusetts, you hunker down and hope the tide misses you.

I’m convinced that in 2008, Barack Obama didn’t expect to win. At least at first.

When he began his run for the White House, he was a first-term junior senator after being a state senator in Illinois for three terms. No one seriously thought he was qualified for the top job, not in his first attempt. I’m sure they thought he’d put in a showing to increase his Senate profile and set himself up for a serious run later. But then his campaign gained steam as the media picked up the narrative of “Barack the messiah” who would save the world from ourselves.

Likewise, I don’t think Donald Trump ever expected to get the party nomination. He’s an entrepreneur whose success is debatable, but with such a huge ego that he convinces everyone he’s a success. He’s a reality TV star whose trademark is bombast and outrageousness. He’s never had, and still doesn’t have, a serious presidential campaign operation; he doesn’t raise money like a serious presidential candidate; and for the first part of the primary campaign he was the spoiler, the guy with nothing to lose who was willing to say the most outrageous things that the average Joe always hoped someone would say. And suddenly, with all that media attention and the disdain of the political class, he was winning and kept winning.

That doesn’t mean I think Trump will win the general election. He’s a political novice whose mistakes will probably catch up to him, although Hillary is such a horrible candidate that he still has a fighting chance.

But it’s an interesting commentary on the state of our nation that the highest levels of our political process, the contest for the Office of the President of the United States, has become a prize to grab for whichever demagogue and/or clown rises up to tickle the ears of the people and provide fodder for the gaping maw of the 24/7 news cycle monster.

At the end of another disastrous Supreme Court term, one in which the judicial giant, Antonin Scalia, was lost, the Court handed down a terrible decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy that overturned Texas’ law that put abortion clinics under the same sort of regulations that other surgical clinics have to abide by. This sets back the cause of saving live of babies yet again and puts even more women at risk of another Kermit Gosnell mass murder situation.

It’s been a year since the end of the previous Supreme Court term, in which they disastrously created a constitutional right to marry someone of the same sex and so I wanted to revisit some of my thoughts from then to show how terrible the current bench is and why it’s so important we get better justices.

"In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were." – Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing in the majority opinion of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.

Yes, that's called "children". The whole point of the State protecting and promoting marriage was to protect and promote children, which are vital to the continuation of the State. But ever since we legalized contraception, divorce, and abortion, we've eroded the reason and meaning of civil marriage. So now we come to this: Marriage now exists to magnify the most important thing of all: The All-Glorious Me! And children, for many people–heterosexual and homosexual alike–exist for the same reason: to reflect on Me! and how they make Me! feel.

The State will soon issue each of us a reflecting pool in which we can gaze at ourselves to our heart's content while everything crumbles around us, unheeded.

(Yes, infertile unions are still valid civil marriages because they bear the potential and the meaning of childbearing. It's a complicated philosophical thought. Just turn on MSNBC and don't worry about it.)

Let’s also heap scorn on Justice Kennedy's purple prose at the end of his majority opinion: "Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness." Yep, that's right. Suddenly the US Constitution's job is to ensure that people aren't lonely.

It's not the Nanny State. It's the Yenta State, validating your love and making sure you aren't lonely.

By the way, I wonder how all those happily single people feel about being "condemned to live in loneliness."

Finally, a few quick thoughts:

It’s time for the Church to get out of the civil marriage business. See the Justice of the Peace to get the legal document, then go to the church for the sacrament.

Homosexuals make up less than 3% of the population of the US. It’s not going to be a large number of marriages. But be prepared for advertisers and Hollywood to have them show up everywhere.

We lost this battle when no-fault divorce was legalized and with the acceptance “sweet mystery of life” clause (so-dubbed by Justice Antonin Scalia) in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, not coincidentally also written by Kennedy: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” By that way of thinking, anything at all is permissible.

I read, and one thing became abundantly clear: the 24-hour social media cycle has caused the various factions to become even more entrenched, their immediate reactions betraying a driving need to balkanize people still more. No breathing room. No time to process events. No time to allow people to show their humanity to one another.

In the public policy world, we are in the business of solving problems. Solving those problems has become more difficult as the chasm between political viewpoints has virtually exploded — both in width and depth — and that balkanization makes it impossible for people to find common ground.

This is more dangerous to the future of our nation than any of the other issues being debated, more than guns, more than even terrorism, because if we can’t even talk to one another, how will we stand together against a common enemy?

Some are saying that House Speaker Paul Ryan is getting ready to endorse Donald Trump despite his previous … reluctance, shall we say. But this new video from Ryan’s office doesn’t suggest that.

What it does suggest is that Ryan sees a leadership gap in our country, a possibility where we may end up with a president that a majority really wants (even more than the current one). Perhaps leadership doesn’t need to come from the White House. Maybe if we have a buffoon Republican in the Oval Office, we can have real leadership from the Speaker’s rostrum in the House. It’s a nice idea.

It will be interesting to follow this #ConfidentAmerica initiative to see where it goes.

Think about it: we already expect so much of our public schools, and now … this? Is it really so important to force schools to let boys play on girl teams, and vice versa, and so forth? Progress, I guess. …

Whenever liberals accuse conservatives of waging culture war, I think of things like this and wonder what kind of world they live in inside their heads. Was this a pressing need right now? Did the federal government have to nationalize bathroom, locker room, and athletic team policy, to enforce a highly controversial point of view onto a diverse nation that was never consulted?

This tracks with so much else of the liberal SJW agenda. Schools have been tasked with so much more than teaching reading, writing, math, social studies. Now they must “teach ‘life skills,’ nutrition and a school-board approved simulacrum of morality while simultaneously functioning as essentially medium-security prisons for fear of threats both internal and external,” according to an article by Chris Stirewalt, linked by Rod.

The school has become the preferred institution of Big Government to replace the family and the church as the foundations of society. Obviously, it’s because the schools are controlled by the bureaucrats, sometimes directly, but often indirectly through massive federal and state funding that all comes with strings attached. They strip parents of their right and duty to raise and form their children according to their own principles and values and they do so because parents won’t raise their children according to the new SJW ideologies. And churches must be pre-empted as well because the pesky constitution puts them outside the control of those same bureaucrats and because they stand for those values that the SJWs don’t want parents instilling in their kids.

Obama and his allies know that imposing Gay/Straight Alliances and transgender bathroom policies on children in schools is important because they know the way to change American to their warped thinking is through indoctrination of children. You don’t have to believe me. They say it themselves.

Yet another reason we homeschool our children. I wonder how long before that becomes illegal.

I don’t think I’ve read a more pedantic and deeply flawed piece of reasoning in a non-liberal publication in some time. Breitbart writer Julia Hahn takes House Speaker Paul Ryan to task for his comments that restricting Muslim immigration is un-American by calling him a hypocrite for sending his kids to a Catholic parochial school. What?!

For some context, it’s important to note that Breitbart has become a shill for the Donald Trump campaign and Ryan has withheld his endorsement of Trump. And Ryan’s comments on Muslim immigration can be seen as a rebuke to Trump’s inane comments (is there any other kind) on the subject.

So Hahn’s thesis is that because Paul Ryan sends his kids to a parish-connected Catholic school, and because the school asks “perspective” (sic) students about their religious background, and because the school gives a tuition discount to parishioners, and because parishioners are therefore Catholic and not Muslim, and because charging higher tuition must be the same as refusing them admittance to the United States, then Paul Ryan is a hypocrite on Muslim immigration.

Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. And you can be sure Julia Hahn doesn’t believe the crap she’s peddling either. Instead, it’s just a ham-fisted attempt to attack Paul Ryan for failing to pay obeisance before The Donald.

In other words, we can expect the same irrational fawning we saw from Slate and HuffPost and MSNBC for Barack Obama over the past eight years from Breitbart and Sean Hannity and other Trump water-carriers over hypothetical presidency.

When I’m out with my two oldest daughters, 10 and 8, but without Melanie, when it comes time for them to use the bathroom, I let them go into the ladies’ room alone (unless there’s a family/single-use restroom available). What else can I do? They’re too old for me to take into the men’s room and I can’t go into the ladies’ room with them.

Until now, I guess. As the guy in the video shows, Target’s new restroom policy means any man–no matter how he’s dressed or whether he’s surgically mutilated himself–can now use the ladies’ room.

In the past, I thought my girls would be safe in there with other women. But now that any pervert has access, I’m not so sure anymore. So now, ladies, I’ll be exercising my new right to enter your bathroom and stand guard over my daughters’ bathroom stall while they use it. And you’re welcome to come into the men’s room to do the same for your boys.

Of course, we could just avoid patronizing Target, which we might do. But once this policy spreads to every business–as is the Social Justice Warriors’ intent–that won’t be a real option. So get used to men like me in your bathrooms, ladies. You can thank the tiny handful of trans-activists and their SJW allies for that. Sorry.

So said President Obama in an interview at South by Southwest today when asked about our ability to encrypt our smartphones in such a way that national security and law enforcement agencies may be unable to decrypt them. And it’s the sort of thing a man who doesn’t own a smartphone would say. I mean, the man’s the president of the United States, of course he doesn’t.

But those of who do know what it’s like to have a smartphone know that it’s more than just a gadget or tool. It often contains our most personal information, our financial information, health and medical information, personal journals, and more. It’s become an extension of our own brains. Having the encryption that safeguards them from the prying eyes of criminals, of foreign nations, of our own government isn’t mere fetishization. It’s the very heart of privacy.

This isn’t a Democrat/Republican issue nor is it a conservative/liberal issue.

Obama said, “The question we now have to ask is if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”

With police work. With good intelligence. With hard work. Because not once, ever, has everything depended on something inside the locked box. Because every sicko porn freak and every hell-bent terrorist has been a human being working with other human beings and they don’t work exclusively through digital encryption, but also through human interaction and that’s where the police work comes in. Sure, it’d be easier to hack the phones, but at what price?

Should we compromise the liberty of every American to capture hypothetical terrorists? Should we give up our liberty and privacy for the sake of some hypothetical security? Because if we do, we’ll just end up with neither.

Fr. Chip Hines and Dom Bettinelli are two different kinds of fathers talking this time about preparing for Advent and Christmas, Thanksgiving recollections, 20 years of Good Will Hunting, the NFL in the homestretch to the playoffs, and picks of the week.

Fr. Chip Hines and Dom Bettinelli are two different kinds of fathers talking this time about their experiences as Boy Scouts and Dom's boys joining Cub Scouts; Fr. Chip's latest health challenge; going to the Apple Store; watching Spiderman Homecoming and Cars 3; new Star Wars movies and a Lord of the Rings TV show.

Fr. Chip Hines and Dom Bettinelli are two different kinds of fathers talking this time about Halloween favorite candy and music and memories from childhood; birthdays; dying friends; seeing Alton Brown; car insurance; and the awkwardness of people singing to you.

Fr. Chip Hines and Dom Bettinelli are two different kinds of fathers talking this time about supervolcanoes and all the natural and manmade disasters we've been experiencing, the #MeToo social media campaign, hosting the chaplain for the Atlanta Falcons, visiting St. Anthony, religion on The Orville, and nobility on Star Trek: Discovery.

Fr. Chip Hines and Dom Bettinelli are two different kinds of fathers talking this time about California retreating, touching an angel, state house testifying, remembering Tom Petty, mourning for Las Vegas, and watching new TV shows for the new TV season.

This content uses referral links. Read our disclosure policy for more info.Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.